CONFESSIONS OF AN OREGON PLAYWRIGHT

By Charles Deemer

 

From Northwest Variety

 

 

 

I’ve never had a strong sense of place. Born more or less "rootless" into a Navy family for whom travel was frequent and "homes" like Virginia and Texas merely a temporary stop between tours of duty, for whom relatives in the Delaware Valley country of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were people one visited on occasional holidays--I grew up with a crazy mixed-up accent of speech and a sense of keeping my toothbrush ever at the ready. 

My accent had been honed along the beaches of Virginia, where I was born in 1939 at the Naval Hospital in Norfolk, and at George Peabody Elementary School in Dallas, where I began school. No doubt the influence of my parents, with their Pennsylvania Dutch roots, was in there somewhere as well. At any rate, by third grade when we were moving yet again, this time to the melting pot of Southern California, my accent was sufficiently foreign, which is to say sufficiently "southern," that my parents were persuaded that I needed Speech Therapy, which the Pasadena School System gave me gratis until I spoke like a human being. This isn't the kind of background that gives one a strong sense of place. 

I don't recall hearing a thing about the Pacific Northwest by the time I graduated from high school. Indeed, somewhere along the way, in the frequent change of school systems, I had missed the study of geography and to this day cannot identify the states on a U.S. map, despite my travels. But in 1957, having survived the early years of rock-n-roll to graduate from high school and be accepted at Cal. Tech. (where I expected to become a mathematician or an astronomer, to whom a sense of place is, after all, astronomical), I became aware of Oregon, to the north, where my parents planned to settle into early retirement, in Medford. 

Since today I have something of a reputation as "an Oregon playwright," at this point it would be properly dramatic to confess that it was love at first sight, that I took readily to the woods and wilds of the Northwest, became a great fisherman and hunter, camped out for weeks at a time, learned to survive on regional flora. In truth, my early memory of Medford was that it was terribly boring. There was no jazz station on the radio. No decent bookstore in town. No one seemed to have heard of Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf or any of the other blues artists I was discovering in the late fifties. Medford, and Oregon, must be a fine place to retire since it sure seemed like a boring place to live. 

Enjoying the Northwest came later. For reasons too complex to relate here, I dropped out of school in 1959, joined the Army, and spent, it was one of several profound decisions I've made in my life: for three years I received an intense education from my fellow linguists, most of whom were senior to me by five or six years, with Masters Degrees from Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, Chicago and Columbia, graduate students who had joined the Agency ("choice, not chance") a step ahead of the draft. They told me what books to read and became the foundation of an intellectual community I had not been a part of before, not even at Cal. Tech.--and this community, the Army being what it is, had no common geographic roots. Yet one of my senior colleagues, Dick Crooks, was a Northwest fanatic--or to be more precise, a fanatic for the timber and palousse country of northern Idaho. 

Dick had nothing if not a sense of place. I was captivated by his deep feeling for "home," and the closer Dick and I became, the more his sense of place became my own. Over German beers and German wine, I could listen for hours to Dick's romantic tales of his northwest Idaho country and its colorful loggers, of drinking and gambling and whoring and carrying-on in towns like Orofino, Pierce, Riggins. It was Dick who introduced me to the music of Woody Guthrie (twenty years later I would perform a one-man Guthrie show), particularly to the folk poet's songs about the Columbia River. I heard my first logging jokes from Dick. I learned about something he called "the high lonesome" (later a central image in my short story, "The Idaho Jacket"). 

After discharge, I visited Dick in Orofino, his home town on the Clearwater River, and with Orofino as home base I was given a guided tour through what suddenly became "God's country," full of raw beauty and raw people. I was finishing up my undergraduate studies at the time, at UCLA, with no notion that I would become a writer. But suddenly, thanks to Dick, I seemed to know where I was. The Pacific Northwest offered dramatic contrast to the buzz and frantic growth of Southern California, which was beginning to wear on me. Perhaps I missed the Atlantic Ocean and Texas plains of my childhood and longed for wider spaces. Yet I was attracted to the people as much as to landscape: there was something fundamental, genuine and poetic in the manner of the old loggers (some of them Dick's relatives) we uncovered in hideaway homes and bars. I became "a true believer," and years later versions of these same people would begin to populate my plays. 

 

When I began writing fiction in my late twenties, I began with the technical lack of a sense of place, though I didn't realize this at the time. In my short fiction, this was not a serious problem, but in the novel form, to which I began to devote my energy, my inability to create "place" (a fully dimensional environment in which my characters could live) was a major artistic failure. I could create story and character but no sense of atmosphere or environment: the flesh of my people had no skeleton to hang on, and consequently my characters were vague and undefined. It took me no less than three unpublished novels to get the message that I wasn't a novelist. When one doesn't have a sense of place, it's easy to get lost. In the meantime, while working on an M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Oregon, I began to write plays. My initial motive was greed-a blessing in disguise. The University was offering a fat Shubert Playwriting Fellowship and, like any beginning writer, a contest was justification enough for writing a play. I wrote my first play in competition for the Fellowship and came in second. The next year I won the Shubert, and consequently was required to get my M.F.A. in playwriting, not fiction. But I had taken an immediate liking to playwriting as well: a play didn't take as long to write as a novel (three failed novels had exhausted me); more importantly, in a play one didn't have to create a sense of physical space. The space was the stage itself, and bringing its physical aspects to life was the job of the set designer. Moreover, the flesh of a character was hung on an actor. Here, then, was a form in which my strengths (storytelling and the creation of character) were not hurt by my weakness (not knowing where I am). 

In retrospect, I like to think this was an ecstatic moment of discovery, though I cannot pinpoint when it happened. I suppose playwriting just grew on me, like my love of Dick Crooks' Idaho and, by extension, the entire Pacific Northwest--from the hills I wandered east and west of Eugene, to the mountains I visited in Washington and Montana. I graduated with an M.F.A. in playwriting and moved east, surely ready for playwriting's major leagues: I’d eliminated my major technical weakness as a writer with the help of collaborators, Dick and the set designer and the actor. And if alone I didn't have a sufficient sense of place, they gave me one, and together we were going to write some damn good plays. 

 

In early draft the play had the horrible title Goodbye, America, I Love You, and it was the first play, story or novel I had ever set out of the west. Most of my work by the mid-seventies was set in Southern California, where I’d spent much of my youth. Typically my work dealt with the confrontation of the city Californian with the rural Northwest, a journey matching my own; but never had I told a story set on the east coast. Then I wrote a play set on Maryland's Eastern Shore. My usual thematic matter was there, the dramatic confrontation of urban and rural values, but somehow I was shocked to discover that I had actually set a play in the east. "You're becoming one of us," a friend told me.  As much as I admired and was fascinated by the watermen of Chesapeake Bay, who had much in common with Northwest loggers, I obviously was an outsider, an observing stranger. Moreover, for the first time in my life I was gaining a rough sense of place; east coast rhythms and density were swift and compact, and I missed the more open and relaxed texture of the west. I returned in 1977, to Portland, Oregon. 

Goodbye, America, I Love You became The Pardon, the first of a dozen of my plays to premiere in Portland. It is still the only thing I’ve written set on the east coast. 

 

On the surface, a sense of place has become important in my work in recent years: the Northwest backdrop is thematically important in plays such as Country Northwestern (about the last day in a town being flooded by a dam project), Christmas at the Juniper Tavern (the comic confrontation of a logging community with an Eastern guru and his followers), Waitresses (a mother-daughter story of small town Oregonians with dreams of Nashville). I’ve named my northwest territory "Juniper County," and although I set Juniper in Central Oregon, there is a considerable influence of Orofino, Idaho, there as well. Each of the plays above has at least one regional joke I first heard from Dick Crooks. And I’ve been lucky to find set designers who create my small town taverns and kitchens with convincing realism. With my collaborators, then, I've succeeded in becoming "an Oregon playwright." 

But what does this really mean? After all, I don't always write in regional settings: two of my best plays (in my opinion) have nothing to do with the Northwest: The Comedian In Spite of Himself (about the life of Moliere) and The Sadness of Einstein (still unproduced as I write, about certain comic possibilities of the new physics). My most successful play, Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, draws more from my early 1971 one-act, The Death of Teng  Yen-feng, than from the Rajneesh phenomenon in Oregon, although I've yet to meet a journalist who believes me when I say this. In fact, I consider my major playwriting influences to come from the Europeans, with their stronger sense of a theater of  ideas, than from the naturalistic Americans. The sense of place in Our Town^ in which Wilder's dramaturgy cast influences throughout Europe (as Durrenmatt and others have acknowledged), is different from the sense of place in Neil Simon's New York or David Mamet's Chicago, where physical territory can be important. Thorton Wilder wrote of places in the mind, and except for Albee, early Sam Shepard and Arthur Kopit, few of his artistic disciples in the U.S. have gained wide audiences. "The inside of my head is my country," a character of mine sings, and this allegiance is my own. 

If this suggests a fragile allegiance to the Northwest, I admit it. The dramatic opposition of things urban and rural, which is so central in my work, can be set in many environments. I have a sense of being "a westerner" but less of being "a Northwesterner." Most of my stories would work in the Southwest, the small communities of Northern California, the Nevada desert, or on an Hawaiian island. I set many of my plays in Oregon because I live here; I like it here, but I claim no special significance for the region, as I make use of it, other than its being a part of "the (vanishing) west." 

 I'm sure there is a tradition of Northwest literature but I don't feel that I am a significant part of it. That tradition belongs to poets and novelists who grew up here, who hunt and fish (I still don't), who can use a chain saw without endangering life and limb-=the kind of people whom I often put in my plays. As "a regional writer" I suppose I’m something of a spy, "stealing" from the direct experience of others, but like it or not, I find myself called "an Oregon playwright" as if this were especially significant. Indeed, recently a critic wrote that Christmas at the Juniper Tavern is "an Oregon classic" but I haven't the slightest idea what this means. To me, the play is philosophical comedy (even a Zen comedy) about the comic clash of Western and Eastern values and versions of reality. Its relationship to the Rajneesh phenomenon is accidental but also fortunate in its timing, in that it gave the play a large audience (perhaps for all the wrong reasons). But "an Oregon Classic"? 

People have influenced me more than place. Dick Crooks' Northwest became my own but it was probably the magnetism of Dick's personality that made the difference. Portland, which has been very kind to me as a playwright, is kindest with its people. Portland is not an important theatrical town: without an Equity company, it does not belong to the significant regional theater network in this country. To have a play produced in Portland is, frankly, professionally meaningless, as far as one's "resume" is concerned. But Portland is home to Steve Smith, Gary O'Brien, Peter Fornara, Richard Watson and other theater directors and producers who have supported my work for a decade now. They have helped shape my work but this is not the influence of Portland, it is the influence of living artists who just happen to make Portland their home, as I do. Perhaps I found these collaborators so readily--and the most important thing about theater is that it is a collaborative art--because Portland is theatrically insignificant in the national perspective: any genuine playwright who happens along readily stands out. Indeed, my agent in New York considers a Portland premiere no premiere at all; Portland doesn't count. But here I am, working away because I like the people I work with here. The "residency" relationships I've had with Portland theater companies is the very best way a playwright can work: I usually have a stage even before I begin to write. And the stage is my canvas, not the white paper that precedes the script. The stage is my canvas, the actors my language, and I've happily found ready access to both in Portland. 

There are professional advantages and disadvantages in my situation. I get more work done, and presumably grow more artistically, since I’ve reduced the anxiety and hassle of finding a production. At the same time, a Portland production is something of a laboratory test--one can find out much about the strengths and weaknesses of a script, but since Portland is not on the professional theater circuit, there is little communication between Portland and the country's regional theater centers. A play done in Seattle or San Francisco can be seen by directors and producers who matter "in the business" of professional theater. This is unlikely in Portland. 

Then why don't I move to Seattle? I ask myself this annually. But interestingly enough, when I think of moving, I usually think of eastern Oregon, or the coast, or even Dick's Idaho-- country places where the northwest environment is rural and remote. Perhaps I’ve come to have a sense of place, after all: a liking for the sound of rivers, wind in the tall trees, the smell of stark desert and white mountain and vast ocean. This place grows on you. 

Wherever I am, in Portland or elsewhere, I’ll be writing plays set in Juniper County, Oregon, and others that are set elsewhere. I’ll continue to set city against countryside, insider against outsider, logger against guru, and (as in a play in progress) folksinger against singing robot. Juniper, I suppose, has become my image of something that is rootedly western, rootedly special, but which is challenged everywhere by new and different values and realities. Space, solitude, individuality, self-reliance--these are the values I associate with the Northwest, as I make use of them as a playwright. But space may be a dinosaur, doomed to disappear, and self-reliance can easily turn into selfishness: these are the parameters of conflict from which drama emerges. 

I don't expect to be living in Portland forever. Professionally, I need a larger theater market; I just don't want to have to move there. What one does, I suppose, is hide out to write, and commute into the large cities for production. So I'm rather searching for a place to hide out in these days. Recently, in fact, Dick Crooks and I returned to Orofino, and the Clearwater River looked pretty good. But last year it was Hawaii that looked pretty good. And next year? 

In the last analysis, I’m my father's son, always at sea, the Northwest a port that's been good to me but still not quite home. Perhaps the "high lonesome" of Dick Crooks' loggers and the wanderlust of the sailor are related: toothbrush ever at the ready, the human accent mixed-up and crazy, always a step away from needing additional therapy--but who knows where one may find it? 

If this is the same thing as being "an Oregon playwright," that's fine by me. 

 

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